Philosophy

The Two Liberalisms: How a Word I Grew Up With Lost Its Bearings

TLDR

The word liberal has shifted toward engineered outcomes, expert rule, identity based policy, and speech controls, drifting from liberty first principles.
Many modern liberal policies mirror Marxist premises and tend toward soft despotism, relying on centralized control, enforcement, and managed speech.
Marxism and communism share core aims: class conflict as driver, subordination or abolition of private property, central planning by a vanguard, and primacy of the collective over the individual.
Principles beat party labels: true conservatives and classical liberals can be found on either side of the aisle, regardless of Democrat or Republican identity.
The remedy is to reclaim classical liberalism in economy, income, and freedoms, and to defend pluralism and limits on power in law and culture.

Before anything else, I have to ask, when people call themselves liberal today or refer to an individual as liberal in a derogatory manner, do they really understand what they are saying, or what that word once meant? This question is not in jest, it is the crossroads of a language shift that has reshaped, and continues to shape, our politics, our economy, and our freedoms.

I grew up thinking of myself as a liberal, in the classical sense, in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson. As a young man discovering books that made the world feel larger than my small corner of it, liberal meant a belief in inherent human dignity, free inquiry, property rights, the equal rule of law, and distrust of concentrated power wherever it appeared, on a throne, in a boardroom, or inside the state. In my twenties, those convictions hardened: defend free speech especially for ideas I dislike, restrain government so it cannot pick winners and losers, and build prosperity from the bottom up through voluntary exchange, free association, and personal responsibility. That is still, to a large degree, who I am today.

Over the years, however, I have watched the word liberal mutate in everyday conversation, in newsrooms, on campus, on social media platforms, and even in the workforce. It has slowly become shorthand for something more programmatic and coercive; centralized planning masquerading as compassion, speech policed in the name of safety, identity managed by bureaucratic fiat, and economic life steered by technocratic despots who claim to know what everyone really needs. At some point in recent years, recent being very relative, the term liberal was hijacked to push an agenda closer to neo-Marxist social theory than to classical liberalism, more focused on reallocating power by group identity than expanding freedom for persons, as persons.

What Classical Liberalism Meant to Me

When I say I was a liberal in the classical sense, I mean several concrete ideas.

Freedom before permission. The default condition of a citizen is liberty; the government’s powers are limited and enumerated. You do not ask to speak, build, worship, organize, or trade; you merely refrain from violating others’ rights while doing so.
Markets as social cooperation. Markets are information systems that translate dispersed knowledge into goods and services through voluntary exchange.
Equal treatment under law. The law binds rulers and ruled alike. Rights adhere to individuals, not groups.
Open inquiry and tolerance. Free speech is the muscle of a free society; the remedy for bad ideas is better ideas, not censorship.

This had shaped how I viewed debates regarding economy, income, and freedoms. On the economy, I favored open competition and light but firm rules against force and fraud. On income, I believed mobility mattered more than snapshot equality; the moral test was whether people could improve their lot, not whether everyone’s outcomes were the same. On freedoms, I assumed adults should be left alone unless they harmed others, an ethic that requires thick skin, not thick rulebooks.

What Liberal Has Come to Mean in Practice

Today, the word liberal is often used to describe an approach that cuts against those convictions:

From liberty to managed outcomes. Equality before the law gives way to engineered equality of results, which requires mandates, quotas, and an expanding administrative state.
From persuasion to speech policing. Misinformation and hate become elastic labels that justify narrowing debate and outsourcing censorship to platforms.
From individuals to collectives. Policy is framed around group identity with rights and duties assigned by category.
From rule of law to rule by experts. Power migrates from legislatures to agencies and compliance offices you cannot vote out.

On the economy, the result is industrial policy by press release, credits here, bans there, while small businesses drown in compliance. On income, redistribution eclipses opportunity. On freedoms, safety and sensitivity trump the rough and tumble of pluralism.

Call Them by Their Name: Why Many Of Today's Liberals Are Marxists in Practice

This is not about rhetoric; it is about accuracy. The operating premises track Marxist theory more than liberalism. When policies and arguments follow that pattern, we should name it.

Class, now identity, conflict as the lens. The modern program divides society into oppressors v. oppressed, treats disparities as proof of oppression, and assigns moral authority by group.
Political control over the economy. The modern program seeks de facto control of production through mandates, quotas, targeted subsidies, and punitive regulation. It socializes decision making without formal nationalization.
Redistribution as justice. Unequal results are treated as prima facie injustice to be corrected through transfers and quotas rather than by expanding opportunity.
Speech as a superstructure to manage. Language and culture are policed and compelled in service of political goals.
Erosion of mediating institutions. Family, church, voluntary associations, and independent schools are subordinated unless they adopt state approved norms.

Concrete patterns that justify the label:

Compelled ideological compliance in workplaces and licensing.
Quota and parity regimes in hiring, admissions, and contracting.
Sector steering via ESG pressure, energy prohibitions, and compliance scorecards.
Emergency power governance that normalizes rule by guidance.
Platform state censorship compacts that merge public pressure with private enforcement.

This is not the textbook seizure of factories at gunpoint. It is Marxism-by-administration, using culture, finance, and regulation so certain private actors carry out political directives without formal ownership.

Why Marxist Policies Tend Toward Despotism

Those who push for Marxist policies are despotic in nature, not always by personal temperament, but by the logic of the program. Central planning needs compliance. Outcome engineering needs enforcement. Speech control needs monitors. When politics seeks to reorder society from the top down, it must consolidate power, punish dissent, and hollow out independent institutions that might say "no". The result is a soft despotism at first, and often a harder one later, where citizens are managed rather than represented and where rights are permissions that can be withdrawn.

Marxism and Communism: Core Similarities

Because the terms often get blurred, here is how I understand the overlap that matters today.

Common foundation. Communism is the end state envisioned by Marxism. Marxism provides the theory; communism is the promised destination.
Class conflict as driver. Both center on the struggle between exploiters and exploited, whether framed by class or translated into identity categories.
Abolition or subordination of private property. Both treat private ownership of the means of production as the root of exploitation and aim to abolish or neutralize it through state control, party control, or dense regulation that makes ownership nominal.
Central planning and a vanguard. Both rely on a political vanguard to direct the transition, elevate experts or party "comrades", err cadres, and plan production and culture from the top-down.
Collective over individual. Both subordinate individual rights and mediating institutions to collective aims, which invites speech control, compelled conformity, and punishment of dissent.
Internationalist impulse. Both tend to weaken national and local loyalties in favor of universal movements and transnational agendas led by ideological allies.

These shared premises explain why policies that are branded liberal today often look less like liberty and more like soft planning, speech management, and outcome engineering, actively ushering in a despotic and technocratic form of Communism.

Beyond Party Labels: Principles Over Parties

Being a true classical liberal or a true conservative has little to do with whether you identify as a Democrat or a Republican. Either side of the aisle can champion limited government, equal treatment under law, strong civil liberties, prudent budgets, and a vibrant civil society. Party branding changes with cycles and coalitions, principles endure. I judge allies by commitments to liberty, pluralism, and the rule of law, not by the color of their yard sign.

How a Liberal Becomes Conservative Without Moving

There is an old joke: I did not move; the spectrum did. That is how it has felt. Positions that once sat squarely in a liberal tradition, such as defending unpopular speech, skepticism of surveillance, opposition to warrantless searches, support for school choice as a civil rights tool, and the belief that markets generally allocate resources better than central palnners, are now branded right wing because liberal has come to mean social engineering plus rhetorical tolerance.

I am not pining for a rigid past. Classical liberalism contains plenty of internal debates over the safety net, antitrust, immigration, and more. But its center of gravity is liberty. The new usage moves the center toward power, specifically the power to bend private life toward equitable ends administered by the state and its private sector partners.

Economy, Income, and Freedom: A Side by Side

Economy: Classical view: Let prices speak, let entrepreneurs try, let failure instruct; keep taxes simple and rules predictable. Modern view: Guide investment toward favored sectors; penalize disfavored energy; condition credit and contracts on ideological checklists; rescue incumbents deemed systemic.
Income: Classical view: Prioritize mobility and family formation; target aid while preserving incentives to work and save. Modern view: Treat disparities as decisive evidence of discrimination; equalize outcomes through transfers and quotas.
Freedoms: Classical view: Free speech, free association, free worship, free press, under equal protection. Modern view: Expand prohibited speech, compel certain expressions, and outsource censorship to platforms under state pressure.

The Human Cost of a Hijacked Word

Words matter because they carry memory. When liberal is severed from liberty, citizens lose a shared vocabulary for defending their own dignity. We start to accept that freedom must kneel before safety, that opportunity must defer to parity, and that the individual must dissolve into the group. We also lose the guardrails that protect us from well-intentioned control, sprawling bureaucracies, politicized science, and a public square patrolled by unaccountable hall monitors.

I still consider myself liberal in the older, sturdier sense: pro freedom, pro pluralism, pro limits on power. I believe in social compassion without social control, in markets shaped by morality rather than managed by despots, and in a culture strong enough to handle disagreement without demanding silence.

If that posture sounds conservative today, it is only because the word liberal no longer points where it used to. The solution is not to abandon the older meaning but to reclaim it, patiently, persuasively, and with enough humility to admit our own side’s blind spots.

Call me a classical liberal if you like. Or just call me a citizen who refuses to surrender freedom, to euphemism or to ideology.

The Two Liberalisms: How a Word I Grew Up With Lost Its Bearings

TLDR

What Classical Liberalism Meant to Me

What Liberal Has Come to Mean in Practice

Call Them by Their Name: Why Many Of Today's Liberals Are Marxists in Practice

Why Marxist Policies Tend Toward Despotism

Marxism and Communism: Core Similarities

Beyond Party Labels: Principles Over Parties

How a Liberal Becomes Conservative Without Moving

Economy, Income, and Freedom: A Side by Side

The Human Cost of a Hijacked Word

Further Reading: Two Traditions, Side by Side

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